Pedro Sánchez has requested a meeting with Giorgia Meloni on the occasion of her visit to Rome next week. The prime minister, according to La Vanguardia from sources within the Italian Government, has accepted the proposal for a meeting at the Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Executive, but for the moment the schedules do not quite align. The contacts, these same sources explain, are ongoing.
The spokesperson for Izquierda Unida, Enrique Santiago, stated this Thursday that he “has no doubt” that the United States “could have a political interest” in causing “a political crisis in the Government of Spain” and also “to punish those who may have worked to evade the illegal sanctions unilaterally imposed by the United States on Venezuela” for their collaboration in the investigation against the former president of the government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for, among other crimes, influence peddling in the case of the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra.
The Minister of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Albert Dalmau, announced today in the Parliament, during the voting on amendments to the Catalan Public Employment Bill, the creation “for the first time” in Catalonia of 540 positions for national civil servants authorized to fill vacancies for secretaries and auditors in Catalonia. Dalmau assured that the process to implement these positions will be approved next week within the Catalan government.
El Govern de Salvador Illa will have its first budgets and Catalonia will have validated accounts, something that had not happened since 2023. The Catalan Executive will be able to approve the budget project in July after securing the 68 votes necessary for it. After closing the pact with Esquerra Republicana last Tuesday, it remained to regain the six votes from Comuns, who had requested to update the agreement they sealed in February because they consider these will be the only budgets of the legislature.
Surprise, what you call surprise, it really isn’t. That the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra in the middle of the pandemic was a case of moral corruption by the Government is a certainty. A forceps delivery that upset and embarrassed members of the Executive itself and officials who…
Between shock and desolation, from disbelief and perplexity to unease about what may be coming. Again. The PSOE trembles, from north to south and from east to west, after the indictment of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for alleged corruption crimes.
The first time a politician was convicted of influence peddling in Spain was 31 years ago. The historic socialist mayor of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Juan Ignacio Pujana, was sentenced to six years of disqualification, one month of arrest, and a fine. The Barcelona Court considered that he had facilitated an award for the construction and concession of several underground parking lots to a company that in turn had to subcontract the work to a construction company owned by a friend of his. The judges coined the term “chain influence peddling.” The mayor, using his position, pressured municipal technicians and officials. He did so, initially, out of friendship, since the sentence considered that he did not receive money in return, and he was acquitted of the charges of bribery and forgery. Evidently, Pujana disappeared from the public radar. Since then, it has been clear that the crime of influence peddling is one of the most difficult to discern, since it is necessary to prove pressure on an official or public officer and also to have the authority to carry out that coercion. Politicians who are already former, that is, who have left their positions in governments, often maintain a significant capacity for influence in those administrations, so they are often recruited by consultancies and companies to open the doors of the public sector for them. Is this the case of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero?
The car of Judge José Luis Calama on which the investigation, indictment, against José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is based includes a detailed account of the operation of a scheme that wanted to obtain a public loan to save a small airline using for this…
Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is said to have used his influence within the government of Pedro Sánchez and that of Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro to conduct business, according to the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama, who has charged him. The question is: whom did he influence? The court order does not specify which senior government official or administration employee was influenced but, however, hints at meetings, encounters, contacts, or references regarding the moves that the former socialist leader and his network would have made to achieve the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra.
The Government and the Generalitat took a new step this Wednesday in the architecture of Catalan self-government. After President Salvador Illa and the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, sealed a key agreement yesterday to steer the Catalan budgets, the institutional machinery responded with unusual speed by holding a new meeting of the State-Generalitat bilateral commission to support the Generalitat’s deployment of powers, strengthen the shared management of infrastructures, and provide political and economic coverage to the pact between socialists and republicans.